When I first picked up this book, I fell in love. I fell in love because it was marvelous and exactly what I needed in my life that day, better than I ever could have picked on purpose .. in the beginning. By the end I was mostly just finishing it because I hate not finishing a book.
and I was supremely disappointed.

Perhaps I've read The Satanic Verses too many times, I expect more out of Rushdie.

Malik Solanka is mad. Not just irritated or cranky, but filled with fury, and not just his own fury, but the everyman fury that characterises his age. At 55, the Indian born, NY dwelling protagonist of Rushdie's latest novel Fury, has the kind of rage which causes him to stand with a knife over the sleeping bodies of his wife and son, scream in public, and slip between the red heat of anger to blackouts which leave him questioning his sanity and public safety. His anger is also part of the broader anger of the world - the human condition, which prefigures recent terrorist attacks, and hints at the kind of anger which makes anything possible. Fury is used in many contexts in this novel, which is blackly funny, engaging, easy to read, and as verbose and modern as anything Rushdie has written. Fury is everything which is evil in man - the mythical flies; ugly sisters; Erinnyes; Eumenides; vengeful wrath: Terror, strife, Lies, Vengeance, Intemperance; Altercation, Fear and Battle. They are the pursuers of Orestes, guilt, hounding those deserving of their hunger. On the simplest level, the fury is Solanka's guilt at leaving behind his 3 year old son Asmaan, who "twisted in him like a knife", his fear of his self, and anger at the unspoken act performed on him by his stepfather long ago. There is also that empty, self-loathing at the heart of a fearful but prosperous America; a land of sitcoms and shopping malls, and superficial everything, leaving a deep and unfulfilled longing. This longing, also the impetus for creation in its highest form, is also part of that fury. Then there is the broader world's fury; the fury of nations and religious fanatics fighting one another. This is the fury which Mila Milo's father flies into - the Serbias and Croatias and Fiji or Lilliput-Blefuscu as Rushdie names it, or the middle east - the anger of a taxi driver screaming obscenities in his mother tongue, or the anger and ugliness of Eddie Ford's father in Nowheresville, Nix. Tragedy; emptiness; murder for kicks, loneliness; death. This is all at the heart of Solanka's fury. While the book is as rich in linguistic skill and wordplay as any of Rushdie's material, there are some problems with Fury. The number of references are so extensive, especially the references to current pop icon figures, that the book threatens to collapse from the number of names dropped. Few cultural icons escape mention, from Al Pacino, Jennifer Lopez (multiple mentions), Puff-Daddy, N'Sync, Lord of the Rings, Butch Cassidy, Madonna, Star Wars, Gandhi, Max Headroom, Tiger Woods, The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the Bush and Gore election ("Gush vs Bore"), Finnegan's Wake, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Amazon books, you name it. Piled into the novel so tightly, the ongoing references are tedious, and strain credulity, rendering the novel so heavily anchored to today, that it may become meaningless within a few years, despite the universality of the themes. In its attempt to assimilate youth culture, and pick up on all of its radio signals, while still continuing to bring together diverse themes such as the nature of academia, myth, history, political conflict, philosophy, fairy tales, children's stories, science fiction, jingles and rock and roll, Rushdie dilutes his story and makes for an overly convoluted book, where the potential richness of its substance is marred by its reliance on known names and linguistic puns.

Fury is considered by some to be Rushdie's American novel. I think the reason why readers (first time Rushdie readers) say that they adore this book relates to the incessant passing observations at the beginning of the narrative, which make this novel, one of Rushdie's shortest, easier to read. In a nutshell, this story is about millionaire (yes, a realistic character - hardly) doll maker Malik Solanka jetting off to New York to escape his mental breakdown and to avoid the fury that sees him experience memory fugue states, one of which acts as the catalyst that sends him packing; he finds himself standing of his wife with a knife in hand. But what precedes this breakdown is his creation, Little Brain. A doll that becomes a bona fide personality and global phenomenon (a la Wiggles). When Little Brain eclipses his identity, or when his identity/celebrity cannot be separated from Little Brain, Solanka loses it. This is the foundation of the story. How Solanka wrestles with his current demons and how the doll relates to his childhood sexual abuse, which comes much later.
Halfway through this novel though, one can see the ridiculous plot line, which some defend as 'fabulism'. I saw the Gulliver's Travels references (to Lilliput and Blefescu) as feeble attempts for substance. It is as though a deadline was in place and Rushide desperately filled it.
The positives for me, as always, related to Rushdie's mastery of dialogue and vocabulary, and his ability to polarise people: journalists, politicians and readers. Very few writers capture dialogue as he does. However, the characters within Fury are not characters that a reader, especially a non millionaire, can readily sympathise with. The other positive I suppose, is seeing the flawed perception the author has about relationships. The portrayals are unrealistic. It's not suprise that Rushdie has divorced multiple times, and I still think he just doesn't get relationships with substance, because he always goes for the superficial, and that is what his relationships are in this book. Superficial.
For me, even Grendel (Beowulf) is more sympathetic than Malik Solanka and his model 'babe'/journalist girlfriend (that I think Rushdie modelled on his then wife, Padma Lakshimi). By the end of the novel, I didn't care what happened to Solanka. He loses his wife and child to another man and life goes on.
Fury tries too hard to be an 'American novel' and I don't see the reason why authors like Rushdie play into the hype of 'New York validation.' Rushdie didn't need to write a book set in New York in order to validate himself as a New American.

2.5/5

2.5
This was my first Rushdie novel and my hopes where pretty high for the first 50 pages, before I realized the novel was in an un-salvageable tailspin.

Malik Solonka is a professor and notable dollmaker who one day finds himself standing over his wife and son with a knife while they slept peacefully. Realizing that the fits of Fury that come over him are a threat to others. He flees to America, without so much as a note or a goodbye.

There he spends a good 100 pages not doing much of anything except occasionally getting angry but with no real dramatic results. There are a series of murders happening that are frequently alluded to but that we never get enough information to really draw a conclusion on who the perpetrator really is.

Then he meets Mila, a young girl with some daddy issues who flits out of the story relatively quickly, sadly as she was at least interesting. To be replaced by a smoking hot woman named Neela, who frankly is written in a very creepy way, not the good kind of creepy. The what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-this-author kind of creepy. Who the still married Malik falls in love with. Huzzah.

The frustrating part of this book is that even though this is my first Rushdie you could feel that the guy has some serious writing chops. But this novel is just a mishmash of loose ends. You never really find out what happens in half of this tangents he runs off on, the frustration of which is lessened only by the fact that you will be totally apathetic towards his characters. There where whole paragraphs that where so self indulgent that they where basically just lists of obscure Gods or Authors most people have never heard of, it's okay though. They have nothing to do with the story anyways/ I felt like captain America at some points
n  n
The author was basically just shouting 'LOOK AT ME! LOOK HOW SMART I AM!' as half this crap had nothing to do with the story. Over all a rambling waste of time.

Eat Me, America

Anger, unaccountable, existentially driven, psychologically depressing, non—directive anger is the subject matter of Fury. It is anger without a source and without any definite object, pure anger at being alive. It is anger that cannot be assuaged by apology or bought off by restitution. If one were religious, it might be directed toward God in a Job-like tirade. But in an atheist like Solly Solanka it can only be bottled up and leak out unexpectedly for the most trivial reason.

Solly, a cosmopolitan native of the sub-continent, is aware of his paradoxical situation. He has no reason to be angry; yet he is. This makes him angrier still. The world is alien to him. Not just the people but also the architecture, the food, the culture. Everything irritates him from the insane chat of the cleaning lady to the trivialities of the gossip mags. Every comment, every sound, every person grates. He knows it’s his fault, not theirs. But does that really matter?

Solly collects dolls. In fact he made a fortune through dolls - not by collecting but by creating a best selling one called Little Brain. His commercial success has allowed him to bail from his academic Cambridge donnery (dondom? donnage?) to join the New York glitterati as a media luvvie. This is somewhat strange because one of the few things that Solly knows he is really, really angry about is America. He hates its foreign policies, its garish superficiality, its casual racism, its self-satisfied neediness to make anything worthwhile in the world into a commodity it owns.

Solly has escaped Europe precisely because of what America is. “America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured,” he says. His anger is not even noticed in America where everyone is angry about something, and where there are even people like him who are angry about everything. Solly is in his element - the pseudo-sophisticated sham of the Manhattan bien-pensant baroque culture of death. He doesn’t want to be a part of this culture, he wants to be consumed by it as a response to his own self-disgust.

Unfortunately all this anger goes nowhere. It is never explained or resolved but peters out in an unfortunate and sordid set of romances. Kingsley Amis’s Money covered more or less the same ground but with much less hoopla and name dropping. As an almost prophetic statement of the psychological situation of the world just prior to 9/11, I suppose it has merit. But as a novel it’s a collection of snappy lines and even snappier digs that goes nowhere..

This is the latest of a series of Rushdies I've read in the last year and it will probably also be the last. It has all the things that a Rushdies taught me to expect; extremely quirky, almost caricature-like characters, a line of inexplicable and essentially ex nihilo events, and a dollop of odd magical realism.

None of it's very interesting, none of it is particularly engaging with his character, and there is a faint and occasionally disturbing whiff of anti-semitism blowing about, to boot, that I am not sure whether to attribute to the narrators or not. I'm not sure Rushdie notices.

I guess it's like my friend said: "just because they want to kill you doesn't mean you're writing interesting books."

con le Erinni alle calcagna

Malik Solanka è un cinquantenne in crisi, scappa da Londra fino a New York lasciando indietro una moglie allibita e un figlio che lo aspetta tornare da un momento all'altro, inciampa in Neela Mahendra, una donna passionale che finirà per dare la vita per i suoi ideali, e per lei molla anche l'acerba amante che si era intrufolata in casa sua...finchè le Furie non si coalizzano e irrompono nella sua vita...

scritto immediatamente prima dell'undici settembre questo libro racconta insieme una città che non c'è più e la crisi di mezza età dell'autore, che davvero piantò moglie e figlio per una modella, nel romanzo, però più che nella sua autobiografia, Rusdhie è assai generoso con l'amante, non la descrive come l'arpia che le fece da modello, ma la fa comodamente uscire di scena inseguendo altre passioni, la città invece è carica di elettricità e su di essa incombono nubi nere, le Furie si scateneranno, e curiosamente il romanzo appare in un certo senso profetico, non certo come alcuni di DeLillo che a momenti indovinava con anni di anticipo anche il numero degli attentatori, ma di quel tipo di sensazione che coglie chi avverte l'avvicinarsi di una tempesta...cupo e insieme carico di presagi, è un romanzo ostico ma allo stesso tempo vitale, come solo la catarsi della celebrazione della storia può essere...

Rushdie's at-times-brilliant writing style and high brow sense of humor are probably two of the best reasons to read his books. Reading a Rushdie novel is also an interesting experiment in upward intellectual comparison, as I find myself frequently reconnecting with half-forgotten characters from undergraduate humanities courses in my effort to keep pace with Rushdie's habitual use of classic literature and both western and non-western religious canon as metaphor.

In "Fury", Rushdie remains loyal to these traits. It is hard not to admire the intellectual prowess of this man. That said, I was less interested in the characters and subjects of this book than in other Rushdie novels. Nothing quite as compelling here as the entanglements of Shalimar and Boon-yi in "Shalimar The Clown". Neither is "Fury" much of a suspenseful page turner, with the exception of some teaser plot-turns that ultimately dead-end (I won't spoil them here).

The main character, an otherwise mild mannered London professor, is temporarily living in New York City while he sorts out his newly developed tendency to fly into fits of violent rage, which are often accompanied by memory blackouts in which he later recalls nothing or very little of the incidents. Eschewing psychoanalysis ("Fuck Tony Soprano, he was fictional"), Professor Solanka chooses to fight his demons on his own, or at least mainly on his own, as those who assist him do so mostly without knowing.

Solanka has recently come into great wealth by the inadvertent transformation of his hobby - dollmaking - into a media empire based on one of his creations, named Little Brain. Think of inventing Hannah Montana in your garage one weekend and selling her to Disney, with generous royalty rights on the merchandising and spin-offs. As such, Solanka cavorts with New York's upper crust, and Rushdie's description of that sub-culture's preoccupations in the blissfully naive pre-9/11 summer of 2000 is highly entertaining.

If you're looking for high suspense, great existential pondering or lovable, sympathetic characters to relate to, "Fury" is probably not for you. But if you like Rushdie's other writings and can tolerate a meandering character deconstruction with significant autobiographical suggestions, you will very likely find "Fury" worth your while.

If you are a fan of the band Neutral Milk Hotel and/or Rock Plaza Central, you’re familiar with the way some of the songs descend into a glorious cacophonous mess at the end (similar to The Beatles song “A Day in the Life”). What seems to be a chaotic aural blend of instrumentation somehow works; it’s pleasing to the ear. When I started Salman Rushdie’s Fury, I had the same hope for it, that somehow the jumbled chaos of characters, settings, and events would evolve into a story not simply understandable but beautiful, and not beautiful in spite of its flaws but because of them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Rushdie’s exegesis on the supposed furies that we all feel hinges on his protagonist, Malik Solanka, an Indian philosophy professor who previously lived in England but moved to The Big Apple when he suddenly found himself standing over his wife and children with a carving knife. He became famous in England for making dolls, specifically one called “Little Brain,” a little girl puppet who interviews famous philosophers. The show became a huge success, Solanka sells out to commercial producers, and this ultimately leads to his "fury." Oh, and did I mention that he drinks? A lot?

He’s not the most likable fellow on whom to pin a story; not that protagonists need to be likable (look at Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, hell, almost anything by an Eastern European author), but they do need to be engrossing and, sadly, Solanka just isn’t. Indeed, every character in this book is simply a cardboard cutout: Lifeless and un-interesting. And then there are the numerous sub-plots (the murders of NYC women for example) that are never completely realized or related to Solanka, so I question what they are even doing in the story.

I understand that this is supposed to be satirical, that Rushdie is poking fun at contemporary American life among the intellectual and the wealthy. I also understand that he is playing with our conception of the furies (female spirits of justice and vengeance) of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. “Life is fury. Fury—sexual, oedipal, political, magical, brutal—drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise—the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb,” Solanka says. However, good satire is supposed to expose certain profound truths about its subjects, and I don’t think Rushdie does this with any success. He doesn’t make us feel for his characters (in fact, the entire story strikes me as a bit misogynistic), and he doesn’t make us want to investigate what he is mocking.

Don’t peg me as a Rushdie hater; I loved Midnight’s Children! But this definitely does not do for New York what Midnight’s Children did for Bombay. This is a different Rushdie; this Rushdie has embraced certain critics’ views of his work, the critics who praise him for doing things with style and language that no one else can accomplish and say that this makes up for his somewhat loose grip on plot and character development. It’s almost as if he took these reviews as a personal challenge to see how far he could go before readers noticed that he’s just fucking with us. And the result sucks.

For me, Rushdie is an author that requires my full attention. His writing is complex but beautiful. This book is no different. I would recommend it to anyone who has not previously read a Rushdie as it introduces you to the author without being as intimidating as one of his other, larger, novels. Definately a good read.

Fury is quite different from Rushdi's other works - in some ways worse, in some ways better. Unlike Midnight Children, Shame, Moor's last sigh and Satanic Verses - it is shorter, with lesser character and too weak a story for the master story teller. However the same is made up for by some of most beautiful passages that I have read. It has large passages trying to bring out the sentiment of both Fury and protagonist's love for his son.